Shadows in the Deep Part 1: Edward Johnson
by Valadius Tyro
Summary: A Wyoming historian, Edward Johnson, searches through documents about a weird house on Bedford Bench to find out if it was just child's fantasy, or horrifying reality. Based upon the Cthulhu Mythos from HP Lovecraft.


Shadows in the Deep

Part 1:

The Account of Historian

Edward Johnson

I don't know how to describe the hell I have been through. All those I have told, they all say I'm mad, driven over the edge, crazy. I may be. Or am I not? It's hard to tell anymore. They say that ignorance is bliss. I'm certain that they had no idea just how right they were when they said it.

All that I have seen has not only opened my eyes, but has opened a new fear within me. That of noises that some say don't exist. That of things unseen. That of the strangers that abide in this building with me, even as I write this. Whether I be alive or dead, I will still fear those things. Those foul, reeking things.

It began when I was at my office in Thayne, Wyoming. It's a small place within the close-knit community known as Star Valley that lies just before the western border between Wyoming and Idaho. In fact, one town even sits half in Wyoming and half in Idaho. I used to always find that fact amusing. Until I lost my sense of humor, that is. To the south, heading down the highway, was the town of Afton. And to the north, we have Etna, Alpine, and if you turn right just before a big lodge, you'd be on the highway heading to Jackson Hole and Teton National Park. Jackson Hole and Star Valley are high school sports rivals.

My office was somewhat out of sight of Thayne's main street. I had it put in my house, where I live on the backroads. I do my research there of town and Star Valley history for the historical society, looking through newspapers from the origins of the community dating to when the first Mormon settlers set foot there.

Now I wish they never did.

Before I go on, I will say right now that I don't believe in ghosts, hauntings, paranormal activity, witchcraft, or any other strange and unnatural things. Well, at least I _used_ to. Like when I got that phone call that now I wish I had never gotten.

I was on the computer, looking for some new information I might come up with that would make for great memorials, when the phone rang. When I answered, the voice on the other end sounded young, like maybe a twelve- or eleven-year-old boy, saying he was calling from his home on Bedford Bench. He began to talk to me about an old abandoned house across the street from his home that he thought was haunted. Thinking it was some childish crank call, I was going to hang up. But some curiosity in my head told me to listen further.

He stated to me that he had stepped inside the small, two-story house and was immediately confronted by a nauseous odor. He compared the smell to that of a dead cow he once saw when helping his rancher neighbors. The boy said that he stepped further within, driven by his own childish curiosity. Then he paused in his statement to me, as if not really wanting to say what had happened next, though fighting to go ahead and say it.

After I urged him to continue his tale, he went on to say that he entered a large room, easily large enough to have been a living or family room. Dust had entered his sights, he said, because he rubbed his eyes and saw a ray of moonlight entering a crack from one of the boarded-up windows. And there, caught in the midst of the ray of moonlight, he said he saw a green-black slime that sat in the floor of the room. In amongst the strange stuff, he heard noises. Not the kind that you'd think that you'd hear from a slimy thing. It sounded like an abnormal calling, and he described as sounding like this:

"Tekeli-lili!"

And behind the thing, he said he could catch a glimpse of a skeleton. A human skeleton at that, and clean, gleaming white!

It was then that he ran straight back and out the door. The thing must have not seen him, for it had never followed.

And thus ended his rather scary tale. Obviously, being a man of what I thought was sound mind, I simply suggested that it was his excitement and his eyes playing tricks, but he didn't easily dismiss it as I did. More and more, the boy sounded like he truly believed that what he saw in the infernal house was indeed real, and that he would never return there.

Poor child. I wish now that my curiosity had ended there.

I had him tell me the address of the house so that I may look it up in the library's records in Afton. He reluctantly told me, then we bid our farewells and hung up. I had the address written down before driving to the Star Valley Branch Library in Afton. Unlike the library in Thayne, they had computers and the internet, both a big help.

I went through the Star Valley records and newspapers spanning a lot of years. Nothing seemed to mention a house up on Bedford Bench.

That is, until I decided to ask my good friend, Sheriff Jonathon Wilkes, if I could look through their older police files.

Looking in there, I finally found what I was looking for. It was back in the year 1896. A report of strange noises coming from the house along with queer lights and what would seem to be voices. Some said that these things were unnatural. Of course, folk tended to be rather superstitious back then, I thought. The police looked into it and found only a single widower, living by himself. Said his name was Henry Wicham, a man in his mid-forties who worked a small bit of farmland up on Bedford Bench. When asked the question of his beliefs, he simply replied, "I have none." After that, the police left, dismissing the report as just a way to harass a poor widower.

In ten years' time, another report to the police from one Jack Taylor said that "old man Wicham's at it again" with the lights and big, otherworldly voices. The police to the Wicham house right away, the time being around evening when the sun was barely starting to go down behind the mountains, around seven-o'-clock. And it was then that they saw odd shapes silhouetted in the windows, illuminated by lamp-light and firelight from within. They watched carefully, keep their eyes on the shapes.

They were tall. There was no distinction from the head and shoulders of whatever these things were. They could distinguish arms, but how many? One wrote a report saying he saw four, another saying he saw twelve, and another writing he saw five. And they made horrible noises, these things. Sounds that, the policemen wrote, delved into their soul as if wishing with intent to tear if free from their bodies. Though, there were words. It was speech of some sort.

But they heard another voice. The voice of Wicham. He was screaming. Not just any scream, either. It was a scream of unbound terror! A scream of a man who had been marked to die!

It was then that the policemen charged forward, breaking the door down, to find Wicham, laying on the floor, curled in a fetal position. He was babbling. Babbling something like, "Oh God, forgive me. The work is done."

The police took him and he was admitted into the Lander Institute for the Mentally Retarded. They diagnosed him with severe paranoid schizophrenia. He wasn't heard of since.

As for the things which made the shapes in the windows, they were never found. When the police broke down the door to find Wicham on the floor, the things were gone. They simply said that perhaps the lanterns inside were making the objects within take on strange-looking shadows.

And the house? Abandoned. The door was repaired, though, and all of Wicham's belongings removed and placed in an old shed nearby for storage. I started looking for any information on the items taken from the Wicham house. Indeed, the man had weird taste. The things that really caught my eye were three statuettes made of a stone that no geologist at the time had ever seen before, though they carried properties that were found in many, suggesting perhaps a unique conglomeration of minerals. But the shapes in which these conglomerations were made into were most disturbing to those who had handled and examined them before putting them into storage. One report written about a statuette said that it looked like something that came from an insane patient's nightmare.

The person described the statuette as being made of a green-black stone. And what it was shaped into was that of humanoid posture, with distinct and dexterous hands and legs to stand upright, though the figure was in a crouched position. Its face was like that of an octopus with tentacles dangling downward from where its mouth may be, arms with clawed and dexterous fingers, and wings like that of a dragon of myth. At its base were the words "Great Cthulhu". The second statuette was made of black stone, and was described as even more terrible than the first; a tall being with three backwards-jointed legs and a long red tendril extending from its head. At this being's base were the words "The Bloody Tongue". The third was never described. All I found out about it was, like the other two, it was discarded in the old shed for storage.

These three things intrigued me. I had never heard of such things. Such weird idols. My search led me to the old shed on the files. Much to my dismay, at the time, I found out that it had burned down about a year after Wicham's admittance into the Lander Institute for the Mentally Retarded.

I still wanted to know more, even when I kept telling myself that this was just a coincidence to the boy's vivid imagination. So, I went to the site of the shed's burning. Obviously, the grass had grown in the last hundred years, making the grounds oddly more eerie with the wind whispering warnings in a hissing manner as it sent waves through the blades of grass.

After an hour of searching among the grasses, I found nothing. This left me somewhat disappointed, though at the same time relieved, as if I truly _didn't _want to find any atrocities.

I went home about evening that first night, my mind feeling riddled with questions. Was the boy really telling the truth? Did the things that he saw really exist? Or is this all just a child's imagination gone wild mixed in with odd coincidences? And what was so significant about those statuettes that made them the only things fully described among Wicham's belongings, other than their morbid appearance? And what was the third? More importantly, why wasn't it described like the other two?

I found myself not getting much sleep that night. So many questions, it made my head hurt. Finally, I shut my eyes and found sleep late that night. Though it wasn't particularly restful or peaceful. A dream found my sleep and disrupted it. It was very strange. Nothing seemed to work out. As if geometry in our understanding was completely ignored. As if our three-dimensional thinking and living was truly of little significance to the bigger picture. There were buildings. Huge buildings, bigger than any of our towers. But the shapes used to make them, they made no sense to me. None were the rectangular design we use. There were triangles among trapezohedrons, dodecagons amongst squares. Just looking upon those structures made my head spin.

Then came the calling. It sounded sweet to my ears, but harsh to my brain all at once. It sounded so terrible, I dare not tell you for you to write it down for fear that you or anyone who reads this may hear it, too. But it was calling me, as if wanting me to follow and get to its source.

But before I could follow, I was awakened by my alarm clock. I was panting hard and had a cold sweat on my brow and I felt as if I had no sleep at all, though I slept for a full eight hours. And my head's aching never left me. It stayed there all through breakfast, too.

I went back to my office shortly thereafter, my mind still working over whatever my dream was. What was strange was the fact that those images from my dream never went away. I played music, I watched some show off the internet, but nothing could get the image of those buildings out.

Then it occurred to me. Why not prove, once and for all, that all this was simply an overactive imagination and weird coincidence? I had to go to the house myself. See once and for all that this was all a child's naivety and naught but dust in the wind. I made plans to visit the place. Then I prepared myself for what may be fiction, or horrifying fact.

God, I wish it was the former.

The house itself wasn't as creepy as I had first imagined it, even in the light of the moon above. But even in the mundane appearance, there was something about it. As if some presence either within or outside were generating a dark, almost blasphemous feeling all around it. A chill ran down my spine as I found myself staring at this house. Nothing could move my sight from it.

I never found the courage to move my gaze elsewhere for a whole minute, though it felt like an eternity. But finally, my eyes came back to focus on that house that, though so ordinary, felt so damned hideous.

It was then that I ventured to the door, wondering then why I was so foolish as to choose to come during the night hours. My hand touched the cold, rusted doorknob, turning it slowly before pushing the door inward. The creak of the hinges made me wince, though I kept telling myself that there was nothing inside with me. I left the door open and grabbed my flashlight from my pocket. The dust was disturbed from the wooden floor of the entryway, making the light from the flashlight look like a coned beam across the entry's hall. My nose felt rather agitated by all the dust, urging a sneeze from me.

When I did sneeze, I heard a heavy slam behind me. I didn't want to look, but I turned around and saw that the damned door was shut behind me! And locked!

I called out to whoever was playing games with me from outside, slamming an angry, frightened fist on the old wooden door until I felt the stab and sharp pain of a splinter enter my hand. Jerking my hand away in pain, I didn't hear any reply. Not even a childish giggle that I would have suspected. It was then that I slowly began to realize that it was all a mistake coming here. Now I was alone. Not even God was gazing upon me, if felt.

I found myself shaking uncontrollably, even as I took step after cautious step forward, into the hall. I could see a room ahead. No, two rooms. One on my right and one on my left. I decided to take the left first.

Stepping in this room, I found it to be the dining room. It would seem that those who had taken Wicham's belongings didn't take the furniture. The dining table was still there, and so were the chairs. Odd. A widower, yet there were seven chairs around the table. And the table itself was a mystery. It had three supporting legs and the shape of it. It was the shape that resembled, as close as I can describe it, a combination of a dodecagon and a circle. There was no way such a design could work!

Closer inspection of the woodworks on the chairs and table revealed very weird carvings of what I would have guessed to be hieroglyphics. But they weren't of any sort that I have seen in all my years as a historian. I can hardly describe them, and probably for the better. Something just wasn't right. Nothing seemed right.

Then I turned around and the beam of light from my flashlight shown upon…oh dear God…the idols! Two of them! The Great Cthulhu and the Bloody Tongue! Dear God, my knees began to quiver. My flashlight fell to the floor as I covered my mouth to stifle a scream that was fixing to run up my throat.

This was wrong! It was all wrong! The table and chairs, perfectly preserved even though the house was abandoned for a hundred years, and these hideous idols! They were supposed to be burned with the shed! How? How?!

I stared into darkness in the direction of the statuettes for only a second before I began to feel sick to my stomach. I vomited onto the floor and then shakingly searched for the flashlight, which must have been shaken rather badly because the light turned off when it fell from my hand.

I found myself mumbling uncontrollably, trying to find some way of rationalization as I ran my fingers over the floor, over my own bile, everywhere in search for the flashlight. Without it, the only light about was that of the moon who so mockingly looked down on the scene below her of a man who was on hands and knees, searching for light in the pitch blackness.

My fingers finally found the cylindrical handle of my flashlight and I turned it on. My fumbling for it had led me to the room on the other end of the hall.

And there, smiling malignly at me, was a bleach-white skeleton of a human, its empty eye sockets glancing upon me.

It was then that the voice came, the source sounding like it was from the skeleton itself.

"'Behold, the temple of my divine works, ye of little faith, and tremble', sayeth the Great Cthulhu. Unfold your mind and you may enter his kingdom, Edward. Look upon me and know that I have cheated death. Look upon me now, and know that I've marked you to die! I'a, I'a! I'a Cthulhu Fthagn!"

INTERVIEWER'S NOTES: Mister Edward Johnson never finished his interview here at the Wyoming Psychiatric Hospital. We paused here for the day, to finish when we return the next day. When we returned the next day to delve into what gave him his severe delusional schizophrenia, we were horrified to hear that he had gone into a mad fit the night after we left. He started hitting his head against the concrete wall of his room, they said. None of them reached him in time before he had literally crushed his own skull. Family was notified. Funeral well be held next week. His interview will remain here until family or friends wish to take it. Until then, it will remain locked inside one of our file cabinets. At least his mind is finally at peace and his body to rest.


End file.
